The reason I talk about suffering (and not just consciousness) is:
I’m not confident in either line of reasoning, and both questions are relevant to ‘which species are moral patients?’.
I have nonstandard guesses (though not confident beliefs) about both topics, and if I don’t mention those guesses, people might assume my views are more conventional.
I think that looking at specific types of consciousness (like suffering) can help people think a lot more clearly about consciousness itself. E.g., thinking about scenarios like ‘part of your brain is conscious, but the bodily-damage-detection part isn’t conscious’ can help draw out people’s implicit models of how consciousness works.
Note that not all of my nonstandard views about suffering and consciousness point in the direction of ‘chickens may be less morally important than humans’. E.g., I’ve written before that I put higher probability than most people on ‘chickens are utility monsters, and we should care much more about an individual chicken than about an individual human’—I think this is a pretty straightforward implication of the ‘consciousness is weird and complicated’ view that leads to a bunch of my other conclusions in the OP.
Parts of the OP were also written years apart, and the original reason I wrote up some of the OP content about suffering wasn’t animal-related at all—rather, I was trying to figure out how much to worry about invisibly suffering subsystems of human brains. (Conclusion: It’s at least as worth-worrying-about as chickens, but it’s less worth-worrying-about than I initially thought.)
The reason I talk about suffering (and not just consciousness) is:
I’m not confident in either line of reasoning, and both questions are relevant to ‘which species are moral patients?’.
I have nonstandard guesses (though not confident beliefs) about both topics, and if I don’t mention those guesses, people might assume my views are more conventional.
I think that looking at specific types of consciousness (like suffering) can help people think a lot more clearly about consciousness itself. E.g., thinking about scenarios like ‘part of your brain is conscious, but the bodily-damage-detection part isn’t conscious’ can help draw out people’s implicit models of how consciousness works.
Note that not all of my nonstandard views about suffering and consciousness point in the direction of ‘chickens may be less morally important than humans’. E.g., I’ve written before that I put higher probability than most people on ‘chickens are utility monsters, and we should care much more about an individual chicken than about an individual human’—I think this is a pretty straightforward implication of the ‘consciousness is weird and complicated’ view that leads to a bunch of my other conclusions in the OP.
Parts of the OP were also written years apart, and the original reason I wrote up some of the OP content about suffering wasn’t animal-related at all—rather, I was trying to figure out how much to worry about invisibly suffering subsystems of human brains. (Conclusion: It’s at least as worth-worrying-about as chickens, but it’s less worth-worrying-about than I initially thought.)